The hail storm hits, and you know what every other roofing contractor in your area knows. Busy season just got busier.

During storm season, it may feel pretty easy to find new leads. Word-of-mouth marketing and printed door hangers may get you enough new business to keep you busy for several months.

But when the weather isn’t as nasty, how successful are you at generating new leads? Canvassing neighborhoods (without an obvious cause for concern, like hail) becomes much more time-consuming and reaps fewer and fewer rewards.

One of the best things you can do to help customers find your roofing business is to set up your online business listings and citations for success.

Nail down your Google My Business listing.

If your roofing business doesn’t have a Google My Business listing, most digital marketers would say your business might as well not exist at all. As far as online listings go, Google My Business is the gold standard. And as far as getting new leads online goes, it’s worth its weight in gold.

Verify your Google My Business listing here. If your business is already listed, don’t worry. All you need to do is claim the listing that’s been created for you. Otherwise, you’re starting from scratch. Enter your roofing business name, location, and your business phone number.

Then, you wait. After a few business days, they’ll send you a physical piece of mail you can use to verify the listing once you receive it.

Cement your listings details.

The more business listings like Google My Business you have, the better. Because when it comes to search engine optimization, search engines like Google love to see lots of verified references to your business and links to your business website.

A Word of Caution: Having multiple business listings is a good idea. But if they all say slightly different things, they could do more harm than good to your SEO. Search engines look for consistency in every single one of your business details.

To the letter, make sure your information is exactly the same everywhere it appears online.

Prime your reviews on the top contractor review sites.

Think online reviews don’t matter? Think again. While they used to be somewhat buried within specialized review sites and deep in your online listings, they’re now front and center.

Why? Consumers trust online reviews. And search engines know that. So, search engines like Google are prioritizing businesses with more, higher ratings and reviews online. They’re showing them first in search results, and they’re even showing their average star ratings as well.

Here’s an example of how Google would display roofing contractors near me.

Notice one of the most prominent elements of this Google local pack results example is the 1- to 5-star rating for each roofing contractor. Google displays the number of stars out of 5 businesses like yours have accumulated, and it also shows the number of reviews it’s pulling this average from.

And get this. Google won’t even show your business in this local pack if you don’t have at least a few positive reviews.

Unsure of how to get more reviews online? We can help you generate more reviews on the top roofing contractor review sites.

Hammer home local SEO tactics on your citations.

That means well-qualified, high intent consumers in your physical area are searching for roofing businesses and roofing contractors like you on their phones.

To get to the top of these highly local search results, you’ll need to optimize your listings and citations for local search. These could be the same as the local keywords you use on your website in places like your body copy, URLs, title tags and image attributes. (We call this “on-page SEO.”)

Aside from including the same variations for your city and state across all sites, think about local keywords you can incorporate. Include suburbs, neighborhood names, even popular landmarks your business operates near.